Jordan Fires or Retires 21,000 Civil Servants and Teachers in West Bank

The Jordanian government announced Thursday that it is dismissing or retiring nearly all of the more than 23,000 civil servants and teachers that it employs in the West Bank, a move in line with King Hussein’s decision to sever the kingdom’s ties to the Israeli-occupied territory.

The action, expected for several days, is widely seen as part of a gamble by the king to check the decline of Jordan’s influence in the territory and to revive the Middle East peace process by pressuring Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization to negotiate with each other.

Jordanian officials said about 21,000 civil servants and teachers will be affected beginning Aug. 16, including 16,000 who will be dismissed with severance pay.

Eligible for Pensions

Also affected will be 5,300 employees who have at least 15 years of seniority also will be dismissed but will continue to receive their monthly salaries until they reach retirement age, when they will be eligible for Jordanian pensions.

Unaffected will be a relatively small group of fewer than 2,000 civil servants who deal with religious and legal affairs in the territory, officials said.

Announcing the decision, which was formally adopted at a Cabinet meeting, the state-run Jordan Radio said that responsibility for the dismissed workers and the extensive services they perform in the territory now belongs to the PLO.

The Cabinet, the radio said, noted that the dismissals were “in line with Jordan’s legal and administrative disengagement from the West Bank at the request of the PLO, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”

Hussein announced over the weekend that he was ceding to the PLO his claim to the West Bank, which Jordan ruled from 1948 until its capture by Israel in 1967. This, he said, was in accordance with the PLO’s own wishes and that of the general Arab consensus, as expressed by Arab League summit resolutions adopted over the past 14 years.

The king said he wanted to allay any suspicions that his fellow Arabs might have about competition between Jordan and the PLO for influence in the territory. Thus, a senior Jordanian official said, “From now on, the problem of the occupied territories is the PLO’s predicament.”

In fact, most analysts here interpret the king’s move as an attempt to pressure the PLO to come to terms with Jordan--or, failing that, to discredit the organization by showing that it cannot give the financial and administrative support to the territory that Jordan has provided during 20 years of Israeli occupation.

It is also seen as a response to internal pressures created by the eight-month-old Palestinian uprising in the West Bank which, although aimed against Israeli rule, has also generated much anti-Jordanian sentiment. This in turn has provoked a backlash in Jordan, where native East Bank residents, their own nationalism agitated, have been pressuring Hussein to loosen Jordan’s ties to the West Bank.

“The West Bankers are not ready to say we represent them, but they’ve always been ready to take our money,” said one East Bank businessman, who added that Hussein’s continued support for the West Bank has caused “a lot of resentment” during a period of acute economic austerity in Jordan.

“The king did this because he realized that, after all this time, he hadn’t won the Palestinians but was starting to lose the Jordanians,” the businessman added.

Although widely anticipated, Thursday’s announcement nonetheless startled Israeli authorities, who had virtually dismissed Hussein’s new policy as designed mostly to throw a scare into the PLO and its West Bank supporters.

The real test, an Israeli Foreign Ministry official had said earlier this week, would be whether Hussein took really serious action such as cutting salaries of West Bank employees, closing the bridges connecting the West Bank to Jordan, or withdrawing Jordanian passports from the Palestinians in the territory.

At that point, the official said, the view was that Hussein was essentially bluffing. “If he does one of those three things, we’ll have to reassess the situation,” he said then.

Mahmoud abu Zuluf, editor of Al Quds, a prominent Arabic-language paper in East Jerusalem, said of the Jordanian announcement: “It hurts, it hurts. . . . They want to just make living here unbearable and to tell the people: ‘If you want the PLO, you will suffer. If you don’t want us, you’ll suffer.’ ”

Many of the affected employees were still waiting to learn details of the Jordanian announcement Thursday evening. “Call back tomorrow,” said Nahel Qamar, a post office employee. “We don’t know anything.”

Ali Khatib, a teacher from Ramallah who is one of many for whom the Jordanian payment is a supplement to his Israeli salary, took the news philosophically.

“I think that the (Jordanian) salary is not essential for me because I have another,” he said. Khatib said he collects 50 Jordanian dinars (about $150) per month from Jordan in addition to about 165 dinars ($495) from the Israelis.

“It’s important,” he said of the Jordanian money, “but we don’t depend on it.”

Among many Palestinians in the West Bank, the initial reaction to Hussein’s decision was euphoric, underscoring the distrust--even contempt--in which the Jordanian monarch is held in the occupied territories.

However, the reaction among Palestinians in the East Bank was more subdued and reflective.

Jordanians of Palestinian descent make up 60% of Jordan’s population, and many of them were concerned about the practical impact of Hussein’s decision on the welfare of their families and friends in the West Bank.

Most West Bank residents hold Jordanian passports and would find it difficult to travel outside the territory if the documents are taken away. Jordanian officials have said that further steps to cut Jordan’s ties with the West Bank will be announced shortly, and one rumor rampant in Amman is that the passports held by West Bank residents will not be renewed when they expire.

Difficult Choice

Another concern among East Bank Palestinians is what they will do if they are forced now to choose, in one Palestinian’s words, “between being Jordanian and being Palestinian.”

Hussein himself drew this distinction clearly in a speech last weekend announcing the disengagement.

“Jordan is not Palestine,” he said. East Bank Palestinians enjoy all the rights of Jordanian citizenship, he said--and “all of its obligations.”

“Jordan is our country. We, as much as anyone, have helped to make it what it is today,” a Palestinian writer said. “But Palestine is our homeland, and what the king is asking of us is unfair. How can I choose between being either Palestinian or Jordanian?”

Times staff writer Dan Fisher, in Jerusalem, contributed to this story.